My name is Jean Patel. I am the principal scientist and scientific affairs at Beckman Coulter Microbiology. Antimicrobial resistance is a very significant threat to human health, and it's because we used to have hard-to-treat infections, and now we have impossible-to-treat infections. We don't have enough antibiotics to treat the infections we're seeing today. And then we know these bacteria spread very easily and the infections will become more common.
I really don't see this problem getting better unless we have better antibiotics and better prevention efforts, and use of diagnostics is important for both of those. So, I worked for the CDC for a long time and they taught me what antibiotics stewardship is, and it's the right drug, at the right time, at the right dose, the right duration.
So for us, there's a role in diagnostics for each of those. You need good diagnostics to pick the right drug. Diagnostics are actually very important for dosing information because the breakpoints we apply to susceptibility test results do help determine whether the dose will be effective for the patient.
So, we're very proud of the role that our company plays in antibiotic stewardship. So, antimicrobial susceptibility testing is a test that's been around for over 50 years, and it is still the gold standard for predicting which drug will be effective. But these are slow methods.
And in an era of antimicrobial resistance, methods can no longer be slow. They need to be faster and the test menu has to be very broad. Doctors really need options for which drugs they're going to use to treat infections. We're making sure that we're tracking antimicrobial resistance and that the diagnostics we provide for customers can meet the needs for the kinds of bacteria we see today.
We make sure that we have the right breakpoints on our panels, the most up-to-date drug menu list on our panels, and we want to make sure that we can move faster and be accurate. This is going to be the key to prescribing good antibiotics.
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